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The AZD1222 vaccine is safe and offers approximately 70 percent protection against disease after two doses, writes the team led by Andrew Pollard of the University of Oxford in “The Lancet.”
The preliminary results largely confirm the data that the university and the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astrazeneca had presented in November.
The protective effect is highly dose dependent.
So far, the vaccine, which is being tested in Britain, Brazil and South Africa, has been shown to be safe: Only three of the nearly 24,000 participants developed serious side effects during an initial 3.4-month period, although it is unclear if they proceed. of the vaccine. . One of the participants belongs to the control group that did not receive the Covid-19 vaccine. With a second, the affiliation is unclear. All three have recovered or are improving, he said.
According to the information, the efficacy data is only based on data from 11,600 test people, while the safety data is based on data from almost 24,000. According to the evaluation, the above protective effect is highly dose dependent: of those 4,440 participants who received two full doses, 27 contracted Covid-19, which corresponds to 0.5 percent. In the equally large control group there were 71 (1.6 percent). This results in a 62 percent protective effect.
In the significantly fewer participants who accidentally received half a dose first and then the full dose the second time, the protection was 90 percent: in the actually vaccinated group, 3 of nearly 1,367 people (0.2 percent) became ill , in the equally large group In the control group there were 30 (2.2 percent).
There are no concrete results for people over 55
However, in this part of the vaccination no participant was over 55 years of age. And even with those test people who received two full doses, it is hardly possible to make statements about the elderly, because here only 5 people over 55 got sick. Analyzes in this age group continued, the researchers write.
In the case of infections with the pathogen Sars-CoV-2 that did not lead to disease, the vaccination balance appears weaker: weekly testing of participants showed that 29 out of around 3,300 vaccinated participants were infected (0.9 per percent) in the Almost no largest control group were 40 (1.2 percent). This corresponds to a protective effect of 27 percent. In the few subjects who had received the two different vaccine doses, protection against a symptom-free infection was 59 percent.
Duration of protection is not yet clear
Researchers have not yet been able to provide any information on the duration of the protective effect. The AZD1222 vaccine is based on the weakened version of the chimp cold virus and contains genetic material for a surface protein with which the pathogen Sars-CoV-2 attaches to human cells. The agent is said to promote the formation of specific antibodies and T cells; both are important for the immune system. In total, countries around the world have already ordered billions of cans of Astrazeneca.
